suggesting that we read the poem for its ‘‘solu-
tion.’’ On the contrary, the tensions the poem
generates may instead be entertained as opening
possible, multiple significations, a plurality of
statements encoded in syntax and diction, and
aided—not resolved—line by line, image by
image: dust, wind, cloud, branches and joints,
white ants, little ribs.
The dissonance in reading ‘‘Snow’’ is apparent
in the first five words. The opening conditional ‘‘If
we’’ is immediately rendered unconditional in the
following phrase, ‘‘as we are.’’ Or is it? We may
read this phrase as removing the condition (of
course we are, so whatever follows is), or as assert-
ing a second condition, i.e., that the consequences
of the first condition—which we haven’t actually
come to yet, have we?—are valid only if we remain
fully aware that we are limited to discussing our-
selves only as we are, without illusion. And the
illusion we must reject in our construction of
meaning is the old one, that we are anything
more than biology and chemistry. In its six lines
marked by balance and counterpoint, its single
sentence scored across two tercets of 29 words
each, ‘‘Snow’’ reiterates the fall and rise of the
(Christian) body, but the lyrics don’t sing (or
sign) the old belief; instead, words powder into
an unsignifying thingness, and then, like all things,
fall—through the poem, through our visual expe-
rience of the temporal reading, and through the
illusions of cultural Christian coding, coating
everything finally in white (space).
The ‘‘argument’’ of the poem is located in
Wright’s manipulation of images: if we are but
dust, and if dust rises, then we will rise. So far so
good, and a nicely logical and relatively comfort-
able doxology for one trained—as Wright was—
as an Episcopalian altar boy; yet, despite the
biblical imagery and the allusion to the Platonic
Wordsworth, this rising is material, not spiritual.
Having risen, we become not metaphysical, but
the material ‘‘issue’’ of cloud and wind, and as
that issue we are named (in this the poem’s first
apposition), things that fall. Two reversals of
expectation occur: the culturally coded yearning
for the transcendent escape of the soul is dis-
missed. In its place comes a variation on the
law of the conservation of matter. Our collective
ascension in the first tercet (physical though it
be) becomes that which is necessary for the inevi-
table fall, ‘‘a world of fall,’’ fallen and falling.
Helen Vendler remarks that ‘‘Wright persistently
imagines himself dead, dispersed, re-elemented
into the natural order’’ (7). Here we must read
ourselves into this re-elemented order to encoun-
ter our fate.
‘‘Noon,’’ a later poem in theChina Trace
volume, is a strong, brief example of this poetic
that offers the image as a technique to articulate
what one gathers through the feel of ontology, of
being-in-the-world, and what one surmises about
its potential meaningfulness. ‘‘Half the poem,’’
says Wright, ‘‘is about the physical, the other
halfisabouttheprobableinteriorlandscape....I
don’t think that the interior landscape is any less
real than the exterior landscape’’ (Halflife,104).
Made of three balanced stanzas of four lines each,
some of which are quite long (up to eighteen
syllables), the poem’s exploration of just where
the speaker fits into the cosmos carries a subtle
reminder of Dante and promises (however ironi-
cally) something hopeful, since it is at noon that
theParadisobegins. Yet noon is also of course, in
American mythology at least, high time for a
shootout. Clearly, something serious and yet
self-aware, is at stake.
The first stanza illustrates Wright’s willing-
ness to allow ‘‘the physical world...tojump-
start the imagination’’ (Quarter Notes, 27); it
begins the poem’s succinct move from image to
metaphor to statement of belief:
I look up at the black bulge of the sky
and its belt of stars,
And know I can answer to nothing in all
that shine,
Desire being ash, and not remembered
or brought back by the breath,
Scattered beneath the willow’s fall, a figure
of speech.... (Country Music,145)
Like innumerable poems in the romantic
tradition before it, ‘‘Noon’’ begins with a speaker
looking out at the world, or in this case at the
sky, and experiencing the ‘‘jump-start’’ of imag-
ination. But almost immediately, as in ‘‘Snow,’’
while appearing to make direct observation, the
language slips from description into double
entendre and declaration. ‘‘I can answer to noth-
ing in all that shine’’ may be read as ‘‘I am
nothing, ultimately, in the great black shine of
cosmology,’’ or, inversely, ‘‘I can answer to noth-
ing, and I do, and this is it.’’
The bright noon light of the poem then falls,
without shadow, on the second stanza and the
third, in which Wright admits, ‘‘that what I have
asked for cannot be granted, that what / Is wait-
ing for me is laced in my 2 shoes....’’Heaccepts,Words Are the Diminution of All Things